These also may be placed more on an equality with Hawthorne, although there will of course always be wide
differences of opinion on that point: Hesiod, Herodotus, Menander, Aristophases; Livy, Cæsar, Lucretius, Juvenal;
Ariosto, Macchiavelli, Manzoni, Lope de Vega, Buthas Pato; Corneille, Pascal, Rousseau; Wieland, Klopstock, Heine,
Auerbach; Spenser, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Fielding, Pope, Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson,
Froude; Webster, Emerson, Wasson. Sappho, Bion, Moschus, and Cleanthes were certainly poets of a high order, but only
some fragments of their poetry have survived. Gottfried of Strassburg, the Minnesinger, might be included, and some of
the finest English poetry was written by unknown geniuses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ballads like
“Chevy Chace” and the “Child of Elle” deserve a high place in the rank of poetry; and the German “Reineke Fuchs” is in
its way without a rival. There may be other French, German, and Spanish writers of exceptional excellence with whom I
am unacquainted, but I do not feel that any French or German novelists of the last century ought to be placed on a
level with Hawthorne — only excepting Auerbach. Victor Hugo is grandiloquent, and the others all have some serious
fault or limitation. I suppose that not one in ten of Emerson’s readers has ever heard of Wasson, but he was the better
prose writer of the two, and little inferior as a poet. More elevated he could not be, but more profound, just, logical
and humane — that is, more like Hawthorne. Emerson could not have filled his place on the Atlantic Monthly and
the North American Review.

This web edition published by:

eBooks@Adelaide
The University of Adelaide Library
University of Adelaide
South Australia 5005